Seasons, savings and GDP

Hernando Zuleta

No 4592, Documentos de Trabajo from Universidad del Rosario

Abstract: The industrial revolution and the subsequent industrialization of the economies occurred fi rst in temperate regions. We argue that this and the associated positive correlation between absolute latitude and GDP per capita is due to the fact that countries located far from the equator suffered more profound seasonal fluctuations in climate, namely stronger and longer winters. We propose a growth model of biased innovations that accounts for these facts and show that countries located in temperate regions were more likely to create or adopt capital intensive modes of production.The intuition behind this result is that savings are used to smooth consumption; therefore, in places where output fluctuations are more profound, savings are bigger. Because the incentives to innovate depend on the relative supply factors, economies where savings are bigger are more likely to create or adopt capital intensive technologies.

Keywords: absolute latitude; seasons; endogenous growth; capital using innovations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N00 O00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45
Date: 2008-01-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repository.urosario.edu.co/bitstream/handle/10336/10936/4592.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000092:004592

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo from Universidad del Rosario Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Facultad de Economía ().